Mass moderation in phpBB

The
moderation of large bulletin boards requires a lot of effort. To
guarantee an effective control of the forum activity, the number of
moderators should be proportional to the number of users which populate
the forum. If an inadequate number of moderators makes the maintenance
of the forum defective, on the other hand the presence of many
moderators may generate incoherences and divisions over the forum users.

A crucial problem is then how to effectively moderate large bulletin boards, while relying on a minimal number of moderators.

A further problem is how to reliably rank posts.
Indeed, large bulletin boards grow everyday of thousands of new posts.
The chaotic accumulation of content prevents users from quickly finding
the information they are looking for. Running through all the new posts
is a time-consuming operation, since the relevant posts typically are a
little fraction of the whole. A reliable post ranking system would allow
for emphasizing the informative posts, while putting aside the bad
ones.

To overcome these problems, we have taken inspiration from Slashdot to implement a mass moderation
system for phpBB, the most popular open-source forum package. Mass
moderation makes canonical moderators unneeded, by reliably distributing
the moderation duties to the (best) forum users.